I'm a technical writer and language professional with skills in programming and natural language processing. My passion is finding clear and concise ways to communicate complex information to the people who need it to get things done.

Too often technical information and instructions become blockers or hindrances because they do not match the users' needs – perhaps because there's too much or too little information, or there's not enough context for understanding how something works, or simply because the information is not communicated in the right way.

My job is to remedy that situation: technical documentation should make it easier to accomplish whatever you're trying to do, not get in the way.

This is a sample of my publicly available technical writing works.

• Using resource files (Rightware)
  • This is a rewriting of existing content that was somewhat poorly structured, lacked useful contextual information, and was missing concrete instructions on some aspects of the feature.
  • When working on the rewrite, I combined two earlier, partly overlapping pieces of content; restructured, clarified, and added contextual information; restructured, clarified, and expanded the instructions; and added a screenshot of the relevant UI view in the software.
  • I conducted the rewriting with feedback and suggestions from the documentation team lead.
• Formatting the display of property values and Setting text order in a localized string (Rightware)
  • This is documentation for a new feature. The feature was an expansion of an existing major feature that has multiple different uses, so the new content was embedded into different places in the existing documentation.
  • During the course of writing the documentation, I tested the development feature; planned the content structure and outline; wrote the content; and added screenshots and GIFs to illustrate the use and value of the feature.
  • I wrote the documentation with feedback and suggestions from the documentation team lead and the developer who worked on the feature.
• Log in to Smartly.io (Smartly.io)
  • I wrote the documentation for this basic procedure. I'm linking to a version found through the Wayback Machine from 24 May 2022, since I left the company in June 2022 and the current version has changes made by other people.
• Your first cup of tea – a tutorial
  • I wrote this generic tutorial to demonstrate how to consider a user's skills and knowledge level in instructions and how to create a learning experience through a guided tutorial.
  • The tutorial assumes that the user has never had a cup of tea before and that they have access to a basic kitchen and a grocery store.
  • The tutorial follows the principles of the Diátaxis framework. Its goal is to guide the user through a safe and enjoyable tea-making experience and to teach them enough about the principles of making tea so that they can successfully learn more about it on their own.

• Python scripts for downloading articles from a Zendesk Help Center instance and analyzing basic textual statistics for reporting: https://gist.github.com/samsav/f4ae72eb7d03fa27310f82e0a1d5636e
  • I wrote these scripts for gathering data on a body of help center articles that had been created over years by a large number of people. In combination with Google Analytics, the data was used to prioritize rewriting and editing efforts.
  • The main Python libraries I used were requests, Beautiful Soup, spaCy, pandas, and textstat.
• A command-line program for generating passphrases from a Finnish word list, with the words inflected randomly: https://github.com/samsav/finnish-passphrase-generator
  • I wrote the original version of the program as a final course project for my Computational Morphology class at the University of Helsinki.
  • The program uses morphological information included in the XML word list to gradate and inflect the words.
• A simple Python script for generating passphrases from the Finnish version of a diceware word list: https://github.com/samsav/noppaware-py